


To Dwell in the Chambers of thy Heart

by Syberina5



Series: As I Did Wander [2]
Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence: 1948, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-03-15 17:22:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13618083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syberina5/pseuds/Syberina5
Summary: Disclaimer: I laugh in the face of structure.Author's Note: Probably best to readTo Query, My Wayfarer, of Thee. Also, I still haven't read the books. Issues may arise. Furthermore, I have no idea where this is going or how quickly. It would be folly to expect it to move with the spedTQMWOTdid.Summary: They say white heather grows over the resting place of faeries.





	1. Chapter 1

The wind on deck swept through her and it was wonderful. It felt like flying with the skirt slapping at her, not the same as swimming through the _burn_ with Fergus, Janet, Michael, and the others but just as exciting. She wished she could hold tight to the edges of her cape and sail into the air like Peter Pan. It would be nice to leave the smelly ship but nicer still to feel completely free. Nothing beneath her feet, nothing anywhere to hold her up, save the wind. 

“ _Hallo mon cateon_ ,” Fergus called to her, rooting her back to the boat and calling her back from the daydream she had been enjoying. “ _S’envoler?_ ”

She turned her face out of the sun and looked at her brother—he might be newer and bigger than Roger but he could still pester her out of her fantasies—rolling her eyes at him. The French he insisted on using since he came to the ship was annoying but he at least made time to talk to her. It was more than the others who raced about sailing the ship or her mother who tended Da’s sick stomach almost endlessly. Mum kept pulling her aside, assuring her that it would not last forever, the boredom and loneliness of the journey. Bree had stopped believing her.

“I want to be a gannet,” she told Fergus, flopping against the robes he laid on, “and be just as fast in the sky as I am in the water.”

“You do have the red hair and blue eye of the gannet,” he said, “but your hair is a great deal bigger. It might slow you down.”

She huffed and pushed away again. Looking over towards where her father lay in the sun, her mother stroking his hair, she turned away and looked around, off the boat and to the edges of the water where it became the sky. 

At first she did not realize what she was seeing, blurred as it was by the rays of the sun. “Fergus,” she called, quickly dashing to the side of the ship. “Land!”

“Ah, yes, _mon ange_ , that is Groenland. Vikings live there,” he whispered conspiratorially in her ear. “ _Veux-tu recontrer un?_ I hear they are all blond warriors who eat their dead.”

“And wear breastplates and horned helms and sing Wagner. _Starke Scheite schichtet mir dort am Rande des Rheins zuhauf!_ ,” she intoned in a voice deeper than her own while slowly raising one as though it held a spear. She lowered it again when Fergus looked at her as if he had no idea who she was. She huffed again and watched the distant land get closer. 

“Soon we will land and milord will feel the earth beneath his feet and like Antaeus will have his strength restored.”

“We’re really going to meet Vikings?” she asked and before he could answer turned to ask her mother. Surely Mum would know better than Fergus where the ship was going.

“Ah, ah, ah, _mon ange_ , let them alone until the ship docks. There is still time to pass and waking milord too early will only make him more difficult. _Tu comprends?_ ”

“It’s funny that you call him that.”

Rather than speaking, Fergus tilted his head to the side and raised one eyebrow.

“He’s your Da. It’s funny,” she said wrinkling her nose to show it was not the kind of funny one laughed at, but the kind of funny the kids at primary school said it was that Frank lived in Boston. She never understood it. Frank was Boston the way that her mother was England and her father was Lallybroch—she hadn’t quite put together how that could be when she’d never seen Da at Lallybroch or Mum in England save that one trip to Northumberland to stay with Mum’s friends one Christmas. 

“He is your Da. He is _my_ milord. I have never called him anything else.”

“It’s still funny. You should call him Da. I call him Da and you were with him the whole time. I only just got him.”

It wasn’t all that complicated. It was like when Reverend Reg tried to explain how Roger wasn’t his son even though he called him son and Roger called him father. Not like the way Mum and Bree called Father Murray father. Father Murray was different. And though Bree couldn’t quite explain why—that was how come she’d asked Reverend Reg—she knew it was so. Just like she knew Fregus’ da was her da


	2. Chapter 2

The long flat of waving grass had called to the sea-weary clan as though an enchantress, a siren, were in amongst the tall blades of grass. As soon as Bree had seen it she was off and Fergus, used to minding her, wasn’t far behind. Once the land had risen up to meet Jamie, seemingly literally from his dazed and horrified expression, and had settled down again solidly under his feet, he too felt the pull of solid soil with Claire, his erstwhile minder, trailing close at his heels. 

The day was bright but brisk. Claire wondered if every day so close to the North Pole was like it. Looking around it was like summer but on her skin it was a day past fall. She was not sorry for the extra eighteenth century layers even when she chased after Brianna in the slapping grass. When the wind blew it was no soft, warm gust of even summer in the highlands but a searing whip that turned hands red and fair cheeks rosy. 

It wasn’t long before group amassed together in the shelter of the field. Jamie and Fergus—having caught Brianna in a pincher movement that devolved into tickling and giggles—had picked the spot they’d come to rest in with the squirming pile of child. Claire had joined them. Watching them settle into an interlocked formation with Jamie’s fingers carding through a longer version of his own tresses, Fergus playing some rhythmic clapping game with Bree, and Claire spreading out between the two pairs of boots. 

The little circle they found themselves in reminded Claire of a song one of Uncle Lamb’s students used to sing around the fire at the end of the day: “Will the circle be unbroken by and by, Lord, by and by?” Rather than some misgiving, Claire felt fortified. The circle had been broken, shattered even. Herself and Brianna reaching desperately into the past from twentieth century Inverness, Jamie withering in a woodland cave and then Ardsmuir, Fergus trying to make himself useful to Jenny so as not to be sent away, Jenny and the Murrays using both hands to hold the clan and the house together. But now that pain would be behind them. The circle, like a seal, was whole again. Jamie and Claire had their two living children with them off on a new adventure—which, God willing, would not involve being on the run or hiding from the law—Lallybroch and all its people were insulated from the trouble of being Red Jamie’s kin. Uncle Jared and Aunt Jocasta would act as go-betweens for news to and from. All was as right with the world as it could be. 

For good or ill, this brought not foreboding to Claire Fraser as she sat in the chilled sunshine but peace.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m short on ideas just now; I’ll take some suggestions or requests. They are a good bit from sailing around the Florida peninsula and while I have some vague notions of things I want to happen once they arrive in New Orleans, I have squat for plot.

Jamie was out of sorts. Quite far out of sorts but just how much wasn’t the point. Early in their journey he had been able to disembark every so often, enjoy a respite from the constant motion of the wine dark sea. That time had passed. They were unable to sail far enough out to sea given the currents so that the British colonies weren’t a persistent tease off in the misty distance. So his illness dragged on and the salvation—momentary though it might be—sat just on the edge of his swirling vision yet he could not reach for it without risking all his wife, his children had done. 

It was a torture to feel himself once again a burden on his beloved. He could bear it, for he must, but only just. Only just as long as he must for their sake and not his own. Soon-though never soon enough—they would be past the British colonies and be sailing past those of the Spanish and French. If he could but hold fast he might finally grasp that elusive happiness that was his for so short a time. 

The ship seemed to roll afresh as one source of his happiness—and, yes his misery, for he would give more than he had to be able to hold and cheer her as a father ought—fell as a sack beside him, jarring his resting place on the deck. He could tell from her huff as she landed—so much like her mother’s—that the lass was also chaffing at the restrictions of the sea. 

“ _Mo nighean_ ,” he muttered and she flipped to her stomach, looking up at him.

“I hate ships.”

“Aye, lass,” he returned, “as do I.”

“When will we get there?”

“Some time yet, I’m afeared.”

She groaned and planted her face in the bedclothes that surrounded him—he was grateful Claire had dressed his open air bed afresh when she sent him out of the stink of yet more sick below. As he could not recall Claire responding with such angst to expected bad news, he dearly hoped it had been the case the either she or the lass was too young to overcome it rather than that Brianna had gotten such a tendency from him, that he might have looked as demonstratively wretched at any point in time. Heaven forefend, he might seem so even as he lay ill in his bunk or on deck.

He reached out his hand and took in his own the still small fist lying by his head. At first he simply held it and when she did not fuss or pull it away he used it tug her nearer and lay with her unwashed head by his own—the best thing he’d smelled in ages.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things may be brief for a while.

The cold, stone walls pressed in on him as the weight of irons pulled at his limbs in the dim light and muddled noises around him. The barest sketches of space made it impossible to tell where he was. Fort William? Wentworth? Ardsmuir? Some new hell? All that was clear to Jamie was the agony in his body. Not when it began or where its cause was but that it encompassed him totally. The sense of _wrong_ that wove around and through him added to the heavy metal’s density as well. He could not get his head clear to remember what it was. _Claire? Jenny? Brianna? Lallybroch? Father?_ Something was wrong somebody was in danger but who and how? What was he meant to do to fix it, to save…

He shook his head but pain and his vision swirled. Had he a fever? A head bashing? Was the that cause of his great confusion? 

He tugged at his mind, his body all to no avail. He could do nothing but worry, wretched with the thoughts of who might be hurt, what might come to pass while he laid there useless, agonized, and in aching.


	5. Chapter 5

She’d taken to sleeping on the floor for chunks of the night. 

Waking to thrashing and grunts of distress, Claire proceeded as she’d found worked: bit of water on a cloth, soothe the nightmare away before waking him, rudely if it didn’t work. Jamie was always less upset—or likely to strike out as if at an enemy—if she could get through the terror first. 

“Darling,” she whispered by his ear, cloth wiping away the sweat on his brow, “you’re safe on the ship. We’re together. Brianna, Fergus, they are just next door.” She wet the cloth again and kissed his brow. “Everything is fine. You’re safe; we’re safe, Jenny’s safe”—and she truly wished that was true though she had no way of knowing. “Hush, darling.”

His eyes batted open as she stroked the cloth over his neck. They were disoriented but not stricken or horrified. She listened to his sigh and watched his eyes drift shut. It was early enough in the night that he might fall asleep again and into another awful dream. She refreshed the water again to continue making him more comfortable while she worried that the terrors were becoming more frequent rather than less. She was grateful that they were not the Black Jack Randall nightmares of earlier in their marriage, that it was more fear of danger that so upset him and not reliving the actual tortures he’d endured. They both needed what sleep they could get while still dealing with his seasickness and a small child on a little ship—though Fergus had taken over a large portion of that and she had almost never been so grateful for him.

“Claire,” Jamie said, his voice cracking.

“Yes, darling?

“Lay with me, please.”

Not one to deny him if she could help it, she crawled into the small berth and dropped the cloth on his brow. She sighed and felt how easy it would be to drift off with him, even knowing that in an hour or so he would possibly wake up screaming and afraid of her form beside him, of how he would berate himself if he were to harm her in his fear and terror.

“How much longer?”

“New Spain should be a day or two further south and then we can put ashore for a bit.” She felt him relax—if only minutely—beneath her. “Fresh water, stretch your land legs,” she kissed his jaw, “maybe miss the tide and spend a night on shore.”

He moaned in anticipation. “Aye, _sassenach_ sounds like heaven.”

She hummed against him and pet him until he was back under, sleeping peacefully. Staying as long as she dared, it was only when she could keep her eyes open no longer that she slipped back onto the pallet below and curled up to sleep, hoping they both would make it till morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I remain #sorrynotsorry


End file.
